


The Afterglow of Nightmares

by mossywires



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Resistance (Cartoon)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-25 11:57:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20025442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mossywires/pseuds/mossywires
Summary: Kazuda Xiono dreams in red. It's how things have been ever since the Cataclysm. He wonders if it's here to stay.





	The Afterglow of Nightmares

Kazuda Xiono dreams in red. It's how things have been ever since the Cataclysm. He wonders if it's here to stay.

In his dreams, he is six. He has knocked a glass off a banquet table and is watching the Nabooian wine splatter on the polished stone floor. It spreads across the glistering dark, surrounding the crystalline shards like a seeping sea.  
Then the glass grows, swallows the wine and floor both and Kaz is looking out his bedroom window at the gold specked highrises beyond. Sheer, steel bracketed skyscraper sides reflect the thousand bloody angles of impending destruction. The spear of festering energy hits Hosnian Prime’s atmosphere and vaporises it with a heartstopping boom. Kaz stands witness at his window as the impact shreds continents, tears the mantle from its housing, and rends the planet’s molten bones.  
He looks up, up through the fountains of magma to the frozen stars, and sees the desecrated hulks of two Mon Calamari warships fall. He remembers being stationed up there, how proud he was to serve aboard such beautiful ships. 

He sees his academy friends on patrol. They turn their fighters away from the fire, but it's everywhere. It burns across the controls he knows so well. He aches to fly with them again. Ieeiak shouts frantically into the comm. All Kaz can hear is a muffled roaring, but he knows his friend well enough to read his lips.

_ "Jump to hyperspace," _screams his friend. _ "Ran-cords. Jump, jump, jump." _

It won't work, Kaz knows. leeiak knows this too, fear shining in his eyes; their whites tainted red with the blinding light. It’s a simple, split-second calculation. The planets collapsing has generated a massive gravitational disturbance. They're too close. Too close to home. They'll be pulled back to realspace and devoured by the fire.

Yet what can they do but try? 

Four ships jump. 

Three return.

They spiral back into realspace to tear a many spectrumed hole in the darkness, sparking brilliantly in the afterglow of Hosnian Prime’s demise. The molten husks cool to white-hot shards. The only thing marking the wreckage as anything once resembling New Republic ships is a single fissured plate which spirals end over end, the golden symbol of everything Kaz has ever known carbon scarred and blackened.

Grief empties his lungs. This void, this empty space - it holds him tight, like there’s a black hole consuming his heart. Or perhaps some tiny jagged durasteel fragment has travelled the endless light years between the stars and lodges now in his heart. It hurts. Kaz has to remember to breathe, trapped as he is under the neutron-star-heavy rubble of his past life.

Then he wakes up, and nothing changes.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts for months and hasn't changed much. It feels rough and like it's missing something to me. So hey - constructive criticism - if you want to give some advice or ideas then go ahead, everything's appreciated.


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